Another confusing conflict in ElectricAccelerator

After solving the case of the confounding conflict, my user came back with another scenario where ElectricAccelerator produced an unexpected (to him) conflict:

If you run this build without a history file, using at least two agents, you will see a conflict on the continuation job that executes the cp foo bar command, because that job is allowed to run before the job that creates foo in the recursive make invocation. After one run of course, emake records the dependency in history, so later builds don’t make the same mistake.

This situation is a bit different from the symlink conflict I showed you previously. In that case, it was not obvious what caused the usage that triggered the conflict (the GNU make stat cache). In this case, it’s readily apparent: the continuation job reads (or attempts to read) foo before foo has been created. That’s pretty much a text-book example of the sort of thing that causes conflicts.

What’s surprising in this example is that the continuation job is not automatically serialized with the recursive make that precedes it. In a very real sense, a continuation job is an artificial construct that we created for bookkeeping reasons internal to the implementation of emake. Logically we know that the commands in the continuation job should follow the commands in the recursive make. In fact it would be absolutely trivial for emake to just go ahead and stick in a dependency to ensure that the continuation is not allowed to start until after the recursive make finishes, thereby avoiding this conflict even when you have no history file.

Absolutely trivial to do, yes — but also absolutely wrong. Not for correctness reasons, this time, but for performance. Remember, emake is all about maximizing performance across a broad range of builds. Given a choice between two strategies that both produce correct output, emake uses the strategy that produces the best performance in the general case. For continuation jobs, that means not automatically serializing the continuation against the preceding recursive make. I could give you a wordy, theoretical explanation, but it’s easier to just show you. Suppose that your makefile looked like this instead of the original — the difference here is that the continuation job itself launches another recursive make, rather than just doing a simple cp:

Hopefully you agree that the ideal execution of this build would have both foo and bar running in parallel. Forcing the continuation job to be serialized with the preceding recursive make would choke the performance of this build. And just in case you’re thinking that emake could be really clever by looking at the commands to be executed in the continuation job, and only serializing “when it needs to”: it can’t. First, that would require emake to implement an entire shell syntax parser (or several, really, since you can override SHELL in your makefile). Second, even if emake had that ability, it would be thwarted the instant the command is something like my_custom_script.pl — there’s no way to tell what will happen when that gets invoked. It could be a simple filesystem access. It could be a recursive make. It could be a whole series of recursive makes. Even when the command is something you think you recognize, can emake really be sure? Maybe cp is not our trustworthy standard Unix cp, but something else entirely.

Again, all is not lost for this user. If you want to avoid this conflict, you have a couple options:

1. Use a good history file from a previous build. This is the simplest solution. You’ll only get conflicts in this build if you run without a history file.
2. Refactor the makefile. You can explicitly describe the dependency between the commands in the continuation job and the recursive make by refactoring the makefile so that the stuff in the continuation is instead its own target, thus taking the decision out of emake’s hands. Here’s one way to do that:

   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

   all: do_foo @cp foo bar do_foo: @$(MAKE) foo foo: @sleep 2 && echo hello world > foo

Either of these will eliminate the conflict from your build.